Anglo-Saxon prelude -- Age of Chaucer : Poets of the fourteenth century ; End of the Middle Ages -- English Renaissance : Pre-Elizabethan verse and prose -- Elizabethan Age : Rise of the English drama ; Shakespearian heyday ; The Faerie Queene ; Rare Ben Jonson ; Song-writers and sonneteers ; Courtier poets ; Elizabethan prose -- Seventeenth century : Jacobean drama ; King James's Bible ; Bacon and the pursuit of truth ; Poets sacred and profane ; Prose writers ; John Milton ; Later seventeenth-century prose ; Diarists ; Later seventeenth-century verse ; Tragedy and comedy ; Restoration comedy ; John Dryden -- Eighteenth century -- Alexander Pope ; Swift and the Age of Anne ; Birth of the modern novel ; Eighteenth-century verse ; Growth of the novel ; Johnson and Boswell ; Eighteenth-century prose ; Gothic fantasy ; Sheridan and the comedy of manners -- Nineteenth century : Crabbe and the Romantic revolution ; Nineteenth-century novel ; Critics, essayists and men of letters ; Art of prose ; Later nineteenth-century verse ; Pre-Raphaelite poets ; Aesthetic movement -- Twentieth-century epilogue : Novel ; New novel ; English verse 1914-45 ; Drama ; Critics and biographers
